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In just a few more weeks, contact center and
customer experience professionals from all over the nation will head west for
their annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas for Call Center Week, taking place June 27–July
1 at the Mirage. While “screenplay” and “studio” are phrases usually associated
with another western destination—Hollywood--- CRMXchange got a coming
attraction from two suppliers of innovative applications who give these
household words an entirely different meaning:Kipany and Inference Solutions.

Kipany is a privately held
organization that started 36 years ago as video production company. It began to pivot into its current role as a
customer engagement solution provider when they realized
they could help external companies do a better job of customer acquisition,
service and support as well as message targeting than other companies in the space,
which at the time were mostly ad agencies. “We started out on a
pay-for-performance basis,” said Joe Pennacchio, Chief Technology Officer for Kipany. “Our first
client was Verizon.”

Pennacchio,
developed Kipany’s
data-driven, cloud- based signature solution ScreenPlay about six years ago,
targeting both independent contact centers and those within an organization.
“Our objective has always been to help businesses turn customer service into a
revenue-producing activity,” said Pennacchio.

Kipany believes in taking one-to-one
approach in finding ways to deliver the right message. “Customers want value,” said
Pennachio. “A
company needs to know more about who the customer is before making a relevant
and attractive offer. Analysis from the
back end is important in helping companies to create dynamic content on the
voice channel as well as use the knowledge that’s been developed on the
customer to generate the right content on self-service, website, SMS, social
media and chat.”

Whether
the objective is to provide superior service or pave the way to a sale, Kipany believes
the emphasis should be to help customers solve a problem. “Today’s call is different: customers now
follow a more diverse path. Our philosophy is don’t just try and sell, but
provide a solution.”

Customer engagement is a priority
for cloud-based voice automation technology specialist Inference Solutions as
well, but they approach it from a somewhat different perspective. The
Australian/US company is focused on offering businesses the opportunity to
implement rapid deployment IVR and speech recognition solutions, without the
need to invest in infrastructure or have software development capability.

“There is a need to change the way IVRs are viewed
in the marketplace,” said Callan Schebella, CEO of Inference Solutions. “Too
often, the perception is that they are inherently bad and that people hate to
use them. In short, they get a bad rap. When a business is able to easily build
and maintain their own telephony-based solution without the need to code, it’s positioned
to manage all customer IVR calls from a single point. Having this capability also facilitates the
development of IVR call flows using a simple, browser-based interface”

The
company’s Inference Studio solution is a call control platform that can be used
by any type of business from a large enterprise to a small firm. Beyond IVR, it
also enables functionalities such as speech recognition, voice biometric
identification, text-to-speech (TTS) and contact center integration.

“Transactional
voice automation can reduce the cost of handling calls,” noted Schebella. “Most
premise-based IVR systems have been in place for 10 years or longer. By
migrating to a browser-based cloud system, organizations can get by with fewer agents
while still maintaining a high quality of service. Customers can make PCI-compliant
payments, receive reminders from pharmacies when prescriptions need to be
renewed or notifications from libraries when materials are due. Voice
automation allows calls that previously wouldn’t have happened.”

A call
control platform also allows for what would seem like an obvious economy. Until
recently, Toys ‘R Us had their own separate premise-based IVR for each of their
800 stores, each having to maintain the individual systems separately. “Now
it’s cheaper, faster and easier to manage,” said Schebella. “With the IVRs in
the cloud and all being managed by web browsers, they can be properly scaled to
handle call volume, particularly during peak periods such as the holiday
shopping season.”

Schebella
also is an advocate of intelligent network pre-routing. Businesses can
proactively identify individual callers
by using ANI, DTMF or speech recognition to find out who’s calling before
deciding where to send the call. By performing
pre-routing before the call is sent to the call center, organizations can look
at multiple criteria to qualify the caller: are they a VIP, are they behind on
their payments or do they have an open support ticket? “CRM is the key,” said
Schebella. “In one financial institution, when callers in a specific age group
are inquiring about a 401K, they can be connected to the agent with the proper
expertise. If the person has called before, they will be put through to the
same agent they’ve previously spoken with when possible.”

Kipany’sPennacchio is also quite concerned with interacting
with the CRM and collecting as much customer data as possible, particularly in
regards to shaping the right message. “In many older IT systems, the
consistency of message development is siloed. There’s no fluidity from one
system to the next. The CRM is supposed to track customer interactions,” he
said. “We offer the capability to capture interaction information from whatever
channel the customer communicates on and offer real-time data metrics that can
be integrated with customer information from existing systems.”

He
spoke candidly about the frequent disconnect between organizations that claim
that their priority is to improve customer satisfaction, but often fail to meet
this goal. “While nearly all companies say they place a high value on customer
satisfaction, too many are not willing to make a bottom line commitment to it,”
said Pennacchio “Good customer service isn’t cheap. Metrics such as AHT (average handle time) and call
volume reduction are not necessarily the best ways of measuring results.
Businesses need to mainly focus on how to retain customers.”

Pennacchio believes many companies make price-- as
opposed to agent quality-- the main consideration in choosing their front-line
personnel without thinking about the cost associated with high turnover. He
sees one of the solutions as providing better onboarding and training to ensure
that agents reach higher performance levels faster. “A more experienced agent
can go off script and effectively make small talk, helping them get to the
place they need to be. It’s also important to reduce complexity, enabling ease
of use through the right technology. Call handling times can be reduced when
agent performance requires less effort.”